


Memento Mori

by 2ndA



Category: Stargate Atlantis
Genre: Gen
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2013-11-30
Updated: 2013-11-30
Packaged: 2018-01-03 01:31:14
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 2,020
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/1064083
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/2ndA/pseuds/2ndA
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>"Yeah," Sheppard says, "I remember."</p>
            </blockquote>





	Memento Mori

**Author's Note:**

> about 2,000 words, somewhat slanted quotes from Machiavelli's The Prince. Minor SPOILERS through season 6. For the In memoriam challenge at sga_flashfic

 

  
_Carl Sagan dedicated his book_ Cosmos _to his wife, Ann Druyan:_

_"In the vastness of space and the immensity of time,_

_it is my joy to share a planet and an epoch with Annie"_

  
  
After the Genii—and for the first time in his life—John Sheppard has trouble falling asleep. He figures it’s a stupid thing to go to the medical bay for, so he tosses and turns until, one night, he realizes that Atlantis has its share of dangers but is safer than Earth cities in at least one respect: absolutely no street crime. It’s about 3 AM; he rolls out of bed, puts on his running shoes, and after the five-mile round trip to the East Pier, he can just about close his eyes.  
  
A few nights later, he’s returning from a run along the Western balcony when he notices a light that shouldn’t be there. As he gets closer, he can see Elizabeth has dragged a chair from the mess hall out onto the balcony.  She’s sitting there, wrapped up in one of those ubiquitous grey wool blankets the Red Cross manufactures for refugees, reading by the light of an electric lantern. It’s such a surreal scene—the stark metal platform domesticated by lamplight—that Sheppard doesn’t even realize he’s staring until Elizabeth looks up.  
  
“Sleep-running, Major?” she inquires dryly.  
  
“Uh, I—Just stretching my legs,” he stammers and then, finding himself, “how about you? A little light reading?”  
  
Elizabeth shrugs. “Sort of. Trying to keep my mind off the situation with RV-143.”  
  
John shakes his head. “I still think we should send Lentz and the xenobotanists.”  
  
“I know,” Elizabeth folds down the corner of her page and closes her book. “And they’ve already got their bags packed...but I don’t like the idea of sending them in on their own. That high priestess....”  
  
“Yeah,” Sheppard agrees. “I know what you mean. We could send some guys from C company.”  
  
“And let it be known that our fact-finding parties come with armed escorts? That’s just _asking_ someone to shoot us.”  
  
“It doesn’t have to be _a lot_ of guys from C company,” John protests. He pulls another chair alongside Elizabeth’s—he’s just run five miles, he’ll sit for this argument, thanks—and sits down to convince her.  
  
They end up compromising, as usual: Marine escort, though smaller than John would like, and none of them in disguise (“RV-143 has never even heard of the Fourth Geneva Convention!” “I know that, Major, but we not only heard of it, we signed it.”)

Elizabeth tosses him one of her blankets—just as itchy as he remembers, but he’s grateful for it: he can feel the cool breeze off the ocean now that he’s not moving. They sit next to each other and listen to the sound of the ‘Lantean ocean in the night.  
  
“What’re you reading?” Sheppard asks finally, because if they don’t talk, he’s going to nod off right here on the balcony.  
  
“Here,” Elizabeth drops the book into his lap lazily. “Never fails to put me to sleep.”  
  
It’s a slim hardcover, heavy enough that John can tell it's old, old enough to have rag pages sewn into the cloth binding. He holds the cover page close to the lantern: Niccolo Machiavelli, _The Prince_. A name is written on the inside of the cover; something Weir, the first letter might be E but it’s too short to be Elizabeth—  
  
“It belonged to my father,” Elizabeth says, like she can read John’s mind even while she’s looking out over the water.  
  
“Huh. Well, handwriting like this—tell me he wasn’t a doctor.”  
  
“He was a soldier.”  
  
“Oh.” Sheppard’s pretty sure he didn’t know that.  
  
“Army officer, then aide-de-camp to Eisenhower when he was a general, then an undersecretary when Ike was elected. I went to nine different schools before  we moved to DC.” Elizabeth drops her head back to look up at the stars, so clear on a planet with no light pollution. “He thought that book should be _required reading for all would-be diplomats_.”  
  
Sheppard—who had himself attended three schools by the age of six—can tell she’s quoting, figures that Elizabeth’s father must have shared that opinion frequently and forcefully. He thumbs through the pages, unsure of what to say, studies the stern-looking woodcut frontispiece, the profile of a man in a Renaissance-style doublet. The caption reads, _It is better to be feared than loved, if one cannot be both_.  
  
“What do you think?” he asks suddenly.  
  
“Hmmm?”  
  
“What do you think should be required reading for diplomats?”  
  
Elizabeth turns to look at him, surprised. Just when Sheppard’s about to give the question up as rhetorical—“Jean Cassou,” she says decisively.  
  
“Maybe I should have limited the choices to writers I’ve actually heard of,” Sheppard jokes, and he’s pleased to see Elizabeth smile.  
  
“He’s pretty obscure—but then, so are most diplomats. The good ones, anyway.” She adjusts her blanket and looks back up at the stars. “Cassou was a French intellectual who became involved with the French Resistance during the Second World War—my father’s war. While he was imprisoned by the Vichy, he started composing sonnets in his jail cell: classical sonnets, fourteen lines apiece, very exacting work. He didn’t have any books, no paper, he didn’t even have anything to write with. He composed the sonnets based on what he could remember from years of studying literary culture, and he committed them to memory, seven lines a night. And then, in the middle of the winter, after he’d been in prison for about a year, his jailer gave him some paper. Cassou was not a stupid man, he knew how the game was played: if he recanted, if he wrote an abject apology, the Vichy government would publish it and possibly spare him. And if he wrote a political tract, they would put him up against the nearest wall and execute him. Either way, it would be the end of his resistance.”  
  
The sun is starting to pinken the horizon—it rises in the West here—and John realizes that Elizabeth’s strange bedtime story has nearly lulled him to sleep. “So what’d he do?” he mumbles.  
  
“He wrote down his sonnets, thirty-three of them. And in 1944, after he’d been released from prison camp, he published them. _Thirty-three Sonnets Composed in Secret_. And that,” Elizabeth concludes, “should be required reading for diplomats.”  
  
“I’ll have to look it up,” Sheppard says sleepily.  
  
“What you have to do is get some rest, while I make sure Lentz knows exactly what to say and whom to say it to. You can brief C company afterward.” Elizabeth piles her blanket on top of him…and really, it’s just a blanket, he doesn’t know why he’s having such a hard time moving.  
  
“I still have your book,” he realizes, trying drowsily to untangle his arms.  
  
“Keep it,” Elizabeth says. “I’ve already read it.”  
  
  
Sheppard does keep the book. Long after Elizabeth is gone, it stays on his bedside table and he tells himself he’ll get around to reading it, just as soon as he’s finished _War and Peac_ e. He knows he’s not the only one who keeps these private mementos. There is no cemetery on Atlantis, no churches or shrines or memorials, nothing but that big empty room in Tower 2 that’s become a de facto prayer space for those inclined in that direction. Mourning is a luxury for which the expedition on Atlantis has neither the space nor the time: when someone dies, their job is filled with an indecent haste—otherwise , more people will die. A deceased Expedition member’s personal effects are dispersed as quickly as possible since there’s already a waiting list for that lab desk, their rack space. But those effects often take on a sacred life of their own, cherished by survivors in a way that would probably seem ridiculous on Earth.  
  
Lentz, the corporal he and Elizabeth sent to RV-143, died eight months after that trip, but his navigator still wears his wristwatch. Zelenka has a special windowsill where he keeps a calculator that belonged to Masha Kadlek. Together, they had made up a little Czech contingent of two until the dam on the mainland broke and left Zelenka as the sole representative of his country. In a drawer of Rodney’s little-used desk (gunmetal gray with a laminate woodgrain surface, US Army Supply circa 1976) there’s a proof Peter Grodin left in Rodney’s inbox before leaving to reroute the power station where he died. Rodney wrote all over it in red ink, criticizing the math, before carefully paperclipping it to his own in-the-event-of-my-death letter so it wouldn’t get lost. Ronon always carries the tracker Carson pulled from his shoulder in his pocket…and Sheppard knows that’s not because he misses his captors. Only Teyla—who travels so lightly—seems to have no physical reminders. But once, when Sheppard had stopped in to make silly faces at Torren, she’d commented on the fact that English has a word for the shine that something has because it is old. “Patina,” she’d mused, “And we Athosians have a word for something that is shiny and bright because of its youth. Like your friend Ford.” And John, who had forgotten that anyone else even remembered Aidan Ford, nearly dropped the baby.  
  
So everyone remembers someone, and John remembers Elizabeth, because they were princes together on Atlantis. Eventually, back on Earth for the annual Stargate Command progress review and stranded in a Colorado Springs hotel, he cracks open her father’s book. A prince never lacks legitimate reasons to break his promise, Machiavelli advises him. A wise ruler should never keep faith when doing so would harm his own interests. All armed prophets have been victorious as all unarmed prophets have been destroyed. It is Elizabeth’s book, reminded _Elizabeth_ of someone, but it isn't reminiscent of her at all. When he reaches the part that explains how a child may bear the loss of his father, but the loss of his inheritance may drive him to despair, Sheppard tucks the book away in the bedside table, right next to the Gideon Bible. He leaves it there when he checks out.  
  
  
Colorado Springs is not a town where the bookstores stock a lot of poetry, but John leaves a standing order with Walter and, sure enough, in the next supply run, he receives a copy of Jean Cassou’s secret sonnets. Unfortunately, Sheppard had neglected to mention one critical detail, and so he becomes the proud owner of thirty-three sonnets in French, a language he does not read.  
  
Nevertheless, he props the book up on his desk (a twin to McKay’s), next to the computer he inherited from Colonel Sumner (which he refuses to upgrade). He can’t understand a word of it, but when he has to settle arguments between the Marines and the cooking staff, the chemists and the linguists, the folks from TK-887 and those from NH-158, he bites his tongue and reminds himself that diplomats are poets as much as they are kingmakers. The right words at the right time make a pleasing rhyme, keep you sane in prison, and, if you’re lucky, they can save your life.  
  
The book becomes such a talisman that he’s surprised one day to come in—delayed at one meeting and late to the next—and find someone actually _reading_ it. Daniel Jackson, newly seconded to Atlantis and kept waiting forty minutes, had already read his way through two technical manuals and a briefing book before landing on the only piece of narrative text in the room.  
  
“I hope you don’t mind,” Jackson notices the surprise on Sheppard’s face while he juggles the book, a pen, some notepaper, and tries to shake hands. “I was just trying a little translation—” he waves the sheet of paper covered with impossible handwriting. “My French has gotten pretty rusty since I’ve been out of Egypt and, well, I figure it’s a good language to keep up with. Used to be the language of diplomacy, you know?”  
  
“Yeah,” Sheppard says. “I remember.”


End file.
